"The life of Don Quixote was a life
of Zen; indifferent to the opinions of his fellows,
without a single thought of self, of self-aggrandisement
or self-expression. he Lived twenty four hours every day,
following his instincts (his ideals) as wholeheartedly,
as truly, as naturally, as the blooming flowers in
spring, as the falling of leaves in autumn." Blythe

Zen is the most precious possession of Asia. With its
beginnings in India, development in China, and final
practical application in Japan, it is today the strongest
power in the world. It is a world-power, for in so far as
men live at all, they live by Zen. Wherever there is a
poetical action, a religious aspiration, a heroic
thought, a union of the Nature within a man and the
Nature without, there is Zen.

Speaking generally, in world culture we find Zen most
clearly and significantly in the following: in the
ancient worthies of Chinese Zen, for instance, Eno and
Ummon; in the practical men of affairs of Japan, Hojo
Tokumune, for example, and in the poet Basho; in Christ;
in Eckehart, and in the music of Bach; in Shakespeare and
Wordsworth. 'Zen in English Litarature' embraces the
literature of Zen in Chinese and Japanese, the Chinese
and Japanese classics, and the whole extent of English
literature, with numerous quotations from German, French,
Italian and Spanish literatures. Don Quixote has a
chapter all to himself; he is for the first time, I
believe, satisfactorily explained. He is the purest
example, in the whole of world literature, of the man who
lives by Zen; but Sancho Panza also is not so far from
the Kingdom of Heaven as perhaps even his author
supposed.

...though Don Quixote has taken his place with Hamlet,
Joseph, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Mr. Pecksniff, and
Alice, his true character is not yet recognised either in
his own country or that of his adoption. Of the work of
Cervantes more than that of any other, are Goethe's words
true, that a poet has to be taught his own meaning. The
genius is hardly aware of the significance of his
performance, since so much of it is the God that speaks
through him as a mouthpiece. In the case of Don Quixote
this is further complicated by the fact that Cervantes,
in the Second Part of Don Quixote, destroys,
unconsciously, his own creation in the First Part.

Not only Don Quixote but Sancho Panza also, is utterly
different in the two parts. This is to some extent due to
the fact that the Second Part was written (as an
after-thought?) nine years after the first... In Don
Quixote the importance lies entirely in the character of
Don Quixote, the man himself and his ideals; and the
change of character means that the two Parts are two
entirely different books and are about two entirely
different people of the same name.... In Don Quixote we
have ... sudden degeneration, the sudden putrefaction
before our eyes of a personality. The explanation of this
apparent disentigration, this metamorphosis of a
butterfly into a grub is that Cervantes did not himself
understand clearly what he had done in the First Part,
what kind of being he had created. Cervantes' conscious
and uncouscious intentions in writing the First Part were
opposed. Cervantes tells us ad nauseam that the Romances
of Chivalry were the cause of Quixote's madness. He seems
to have approved of the burning of them by the curate and
the barber, not on the ground that they made people go on
crazy adventures, but because they were poor as
literature, at once unrealistic and inartistic. At the
end of Part II, Quixote recovers from his madness and
declares:

"I am now enemy of Amadis of Gaul and all his tribe:
all the profane histories of Knight errantry are hateful
to me. I now realise the danger and peril into which I
fell by reading them. By mercy of God, I learned by my
own experience, abhor them."

On the other hand, as I shall show later in quotations,
the Don Quixote of the First Part is the quintessence of
all the chivalry of the Romances, all the knighthood of
the Middle Ages, together with spiritual and noble
qualities derived from Cervantes himself. His madness is
partly his idealism (of which we sane people have so
little) partly an overstrung imagination at the service
of this same idealism.

The Don Quixote of Part II is a kind of travelling
lecturer, whose senility is taken advantage of in the
most odious way by a couple of impudent, sophisticated
creatures, the Duke and Duchess. He analyzes himself and
his illusions:

"Doubtless, Senor de Diego de Miranda, you look on
me as a crazy, mad fellow. And it may well seem so, for
my conduct testifies to this alone. Yet, for all that,
let me tell you that I am not so crazy and half-witted as
you take me for."

and discourses on the probabilities of the veracity of
the romances of chivalry:

"There is much to be said," replied don
Quixote, "both for and against the truth of the
romances of Knight Errantry."

The Don Quixote of the First Part os Zen incarnate, of
the Second, a sententious buffoon. Sancho Panza also
suffers a complete change. In the First Part he is the
ordinary man, self-seeking, fond of money, fond of his
belly, stupid, a coward, yet not altogether devoid of
some natural Zen and faith in his master which lifts him,
like Babbit, above the entirly material. In the Second
Part he becomes a just, benevolent, disinterested, clever
judge and faithful servant, and at times the foolish
knave of the First Part, but disbelieving his master's
visions and helping to make a fool of him. The Second
Part is better writen, it is true; more cultivated, more
urbane. It is a book. The First Part is not a book, it is
life itself with its medley of gentleness and brutality,
humour and pain, nobility and vulgarity, all united by
the vision of Don Quixote himself, into a meaningful
whole. The words of Byron in 'Don Juan', though devoid of
poetical merit, need to be pondered over once more:

I should be very willing to redress Men's wrongs, and
rather check than punish crimes, Had not Cervantes, in
that too true tale Of Quixote, shown how all such efforts
fail.

Of all tales 'tis the saddest -- and more sad, Because it
makes us smile; his hero's right, And still pursues the
right; - to curb the bad His only object, and 'gainst all
odds to fight His guerdon: 'tis his virtue makes him mad!
But his adventures form a sorry sight;-- A sorrier still
is the great moral taught By that real epic unto all who
have thought.

Redressing injury, revenging wrong, To aid the damsel and
destroy the chaff; Opposing singly the united strong,
From foreign yoke to free the helpless native:-- Alas!
must noblest views, like an old song, Be for mere fancy's
sport a theme creative, A jest, a riddle, Fame through
thick and thin sought!
And Socrates himself but Wisdom's Quixote?

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh
demolish'd the right arm Of his own country;--seldom
since that day Has Spain had heroes. While Romance could
charm, The world gave ground before that bright array;
And therefore have his volumes done such harm, That all
their glory, as a composition, Was dearly purchased by
his land's perdition.

"All such efforts fail." It does not need
Cervantes to tell us that, and anyway, what does it
matter? "Of all tales 'tis the saddest." The
only sad tales are those of men who renounce their ideals
as Don Quixote does at the end of the Second Part.
"His Virtue makes him mad." There is a profound
truth in this. It was their virtue that made Christ, St.
Francis, Blake, Daruma, all mad, mad as hatters, compared
to sane people like you and me. Which is a sorrier sight,
his life or ours? Again, what is "the great moral
taught," which is such a sorry thing? "Noblest
views" are not "mere fancy's sport:" here
Byron's sense of humour is defective, laughing at Quixote
is one thing, laughing with him is another.

"Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away."
Cervantes coud not do such a thing. You might as well try
to smile the pyramids away, smile death away. Byron could
not laugh religion away in Cain and the Vision of
Judgement. The chivalry which is made fun of in Don
Quixote was already dead. The chivalry which Don Quixote
embodied is as eternal as the faithfulness of
Oishi-Yoshiio, the leader of the 47 Ronin. As to the
later decadence of Spain, if it be ascribed to loss of
Romance, that is to loss of idealism, to the loss of
power to love the better more than the good, this means
the loss of power to distinguish the essential from the
unessential in Don Quixote and this cannot be perversely
blamed upon Don Quixote itself, except in so far as
Cervantes defaces his original in the Second Part and
confuses the issues.

What was wrong with Spain, what is wrong with every
nation, every individual, is the lack of the true spirit
of Don Quixote. Professor Suzuki, in his 'Zen Buddhism
and its Influence on Japanese Culture,' gives an example
of Zen in a bullfighter. No doubt it is correct in its
way, though the bull would afford an equally good
example, at the same level of intelligence of
intelligence and morality. But the man who in the history
of the world exemplifies all that is best in Zen, the man
who surpasses Hakuin, Rinzai, Eno, Daruma and Shakamuni
himself is Don Quixote de la Mancha, Knight Errant.

What is Knight Errantry?

"The Knight-errant searches all the corners of the
world, enters the most complicated labyrinths,
accomplishes at every step the impossible, endures the
fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the
inclemency of wind and ice in winter: lions cannot daunt
him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek,
assault, and overcome such is the whole business of his
life, and true office." (Part Two, ch.
XVII.)

But all this is not mere self-development, born of a
desire to be an Arhat. The object of a Knight Errant,
what he lives for, is

Don Quixote quoting with approval the old Spanish
proverb, "Where one door shuts, another opens,"
reminds us of the Emersonian doctrine of Compensation.
Even pleasant things and happy times many contain
something good and profitable for the soul. This attitude
to life, of willing acceptance of all that comes, or
rather, all that we come to, for our attitude to life
must be active and not passive, is expressed as follows,
when Don Quixote first sallies forth in search of
adventure, taking no thought for the morrow:

"He rode on his way, going where it pleased his
horse to carry him, for he believed that in this
consisted the very soul of adventures." (Part One,
ch. II.)

Even pleasant things and happy times may contain
something good and profitable for the soul. This attitude
to life, of willing acceptance of all that comes, or
rather, all that we come to, for our attitude to life
must be active and not passive, is expressed as follows,
when Don Quixote first sallies forth in search of
adventure, taking no thought for the morrow:

The same attitude of mind is shown in Chapter 50 of the
First Part: we see before us

"...a vast lake of boiling pitch, in which a great
number of snakes, serpents, crocodiles and many other
ferocious and fearful creatures are wallowing about: a
voice wails from the middle of the lake, 'Whosoever thou
art, O Knight, who surveyest this horrible mere, if thou
wishest to obtain the blessing that lies beneath these
gloomy waters, show the might of they valorous breast,
and throw thyself into these black, burning waves; doest
thou not so, thou art not worthy to see the great wonders
of the seven castles and their seven fairies, that lie
beneath these lugubrous surges.' No sooner have these
awful words ceased than without a moment's consideration,
without a thought of the danger he runs, without even
taking off his massive arms, commending himself to God
and to his mistress, he dashes into the middle of the
boiling lake. And just when he does not know what will
happen to him, he finds himself among flowery fields
beyond those of Eliseum."

Everything depends on the mind. It is the mind which
decides whether a thing is a basin or a helmet. The mind
is a conjurer, a magician, a wizard which can change one
thing into another.

"So it is that what looks to you like a barber's
basin, I see clearly to be Mambrino's helmet, and another
man may take it for something else." Part One, Ch.
25)

The mind can change day to night, grief to joy, hell to
heaven.

"'Let God grant it thus,' answered Don Quixote, 'as
I desire and you have need, and may he be a wretch who
thinks himself one.'" (Part One, Ch. 21)

This freedom of the mind, freedom of the will, consists
in following one's instincts, disdaining all causes and
effects, all rationalizing, to act like life itself which
lives the life of life.

"'This is a good point,' replied Don Quixote, 'this
is the essence of my manner of life; for a knight errant
to run mad for some actual reason or other -- there would
be nothing praiseworthy or meritorious in that! The
perfection of it consists in running mad without the
least constraint or necessity.'" (Part One, Ch, 25)

But for all this talking and boasting there is nothing of
egotism in Don Quixote. He is in a state of Muga, a state
in which he himself is nothing, he seeks nothing for
himself, his personality is always dissolved in the
valour and glory of the action itself. So when Sancho
says,

"'These are more than twenty, and we only two, or
rather one and a half.' 'I am worth a hundred', replied
Don Quixote."

and we feel that this is an understatement. Don Quixote
underestimates himself; he is worth more than a hundred
in any combat. But all this spiritual strength does not
derive from Don Quixote himself but from his ideal as
embodied in Dulcinea, and so he tells the doubting Sancho
Panza with great fury:

"'Do you not know, you vulgar rascal, you rogue,
that were it not for the valour she infuses into my arm,
I would not have the strength to kill a flea? Tell me,
viper-tongued villain, who has regained the kingdom,
beheaded the giant, and made you marquis (for all this is
to me as done and finished) but the power of Dulcinea
which uses my arm as instrument of her deeds? She fights
in me, she is victorious in me, and I live and breathe in
her, receive life and being itself from her.'" (Part
One, Ch. 30)

Yet Cervantes does not commit the error of making Don
Quixote superhuman. He is a man of like passions with
ourselves, who feels the pangs of hunger and the smaller
pains of the body. Like Christ, he is often peevish,
unreasonable, expecting too much of human nature, and
himself finds often that discretion is the better part of
valor. Yet for all he can say of himself, as Christ also
could have said, a wilful wrong

"voluntarily and knowingly I never committed to
anyone."
(Part One Ch. 47).

Among many others, there is one especial point of
resemblance between Don Quixote and Blake. Just as in his
visions Blake saw and talked with many of the ancient
worthies, so Don Quixote describes the face, figure and
character of the persons of the Romances:

"'This is another mistake,' replied Don Quixote,
'into which many have fallen, not believing that such
knights-errant ever existed in this world. The truth is
as certain that I may say I have seen Amadis of Gaul with
those my own eyes. He was of great stature, fair of face,
a well-clipped beard,...his face at once fierce and
gently, of few words, slow to anger and easily
pacified.'"

A small but interesting example of Sancho's Zen, quite
accidental and natural, of course, but none the less the
real thing, is given in the 2nd Part of Don Quixote,
Chapter 28, after Sancho has been soundly beaten in the
previous chapter, by the townsmen of Reloxa. The pain is
so great that he turns on his master and for a whole page
pours out a torrent of vituperation on his own folly for
following him, with no profit and every kind of loss
imaginable. Don Quixote then says (remember this is the
Don Quixote of the Second Part who is here simply
Cervantes speaking,)

"'I'll wager,' said Don Quixote, 'that at this
moment while you are going on like this at pleasure, that
you don't feel a bit of pain anywhere.'"

We feel pain when we think of it; while we forget it,
from danger, anger, or any other reason, we feel no pain
whatever. So Blake says,

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of
instruction."

It was the power of Zen that enabled Latimer to
"receive the flame as it were embracing him. After
he had stroked his face with his hands, and (as it were)
bathed them a little in the fire, he soon died (as it
appeared) with very little pain or none." It was the
power of Zen that enabled Drake to finish his game of
bowls and then defeat the Armada.

The humour of Don Quixote, its pathos, -- in what does it
consist? Lockhart says:

"He is the type of a more universal madness -- he is
the symbol of Imagination continually struggling and
contrasted with Reality -- he represents the eternal
warfare between Enthusiasm and Necessity -- the eternal
discrepancy between the aspirations and the occupations
of Man -- the omnipotence and the vanity of human
dreams."

With such a view of life, a kind of spiritual
Zoroastrianism, we can understand nothing at all. We
cannot understand the spider catching the fly, the
shining of the sun, the fall of the spow, -- not even the
simplest things are comprehensible by this kind of
dualism, let alone such a lofty creation as Don Quixote.

Once we divide the world into ideal and real, imagination
and reality, everything becomes a meaningless struggle,
there is no central unity to be seen, it is simply a vast
tragedy of Nature making a fool of Man. The humour of Don
Quixote is the contrast between Reality and Unreality,
between the ideals (that is to say the vision of Truth,
the apprehension of Eternal values,) and the inadequate
methods of Don Quixote takes to put them into practice.
It is a contrast between Wisdom and Folly, between
Perfection of motive and Imperfection of means, between
good aims and bad judgement.

Notice that these opposites are not dualistic in
character, though they sound so. Reality and Unreality,
Wisdom and Folly, are names for the same one thing. We
use them to explain the humour of Don Quixote, as lying
in the contrast between Pure Truth and Impure
Application, but actually these two are one. Defect of
application means defect of vision. When a man sees the
Truth of things, all his actions are perfect. Perfection
means, not perfect actions in a perfect world, but
appropriate actions in an imperfect one. Don Quixote's
are inappropriate, but not, as in our case, as a result
of defect of will, but of defect of judgement. He lacks
the Confucian virtue of Prudence, the balance of the
powers of mind.

The pathos of Don Quixote derives from the same source as
the humour, but with the addition that we ourselves, as
we read the book, have an underlying sense of shame that
our lives are directed to the acquisition of all the
things Don Quixote so rightly despised. No man can read
Don Quixote without a feeling of self-contempt. To forget
this, many laugh at him that they may not weep at
themselves.

The life of Don Quixote was a life of Zen; indifferent to
the opinions of his fellows, without a single thought of
self, of self-aggrandisement or self-expression, he LIVED
twenty four hours every day, following his instincts (his
ideals) as wholeheartedly, as truly, as naturally, as the
blooming of flowers in spring, as the falling of leaves
in autumn.\